


Shaking Paper

by ChemFishee



Category: Music RPF
Genre: 2008 Fic, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-29
Updated: 2013-09-29
Packaged: 2017-12-28 00:13:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/985312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChemFishee/pseuds/ChemFishee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“They say your name like it means everything.” <br/>(March 2008)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shaking Paper

**Author's Note:**

> Twenty-six connected drabbles (100 words, exactly) about my generation’s great (fictionalized) modern romance.   
> Beta'd by LJ's kennedy_unknown, who puts up with my bullshit.
> 
> (Originally posted [here](http://chemfishee.livejournal.com/113186.html).)

**one.**

  
She’s humming low in her throat, a medley of notes tripping over her tongue. Something about a dream, chasing a dragon, frissons of smoke and curling scales. There’s nothing there but a story to tell. A story she wants to tell _him_. And she’s dialing by routine, the need to talk overwhelming her senses until all she can taste is ashes and whiskey.  
  
“What?” He’s surly.  
  
“The fire consumes, if you get there early.” She laughs, inappropriate, and there’s smoke in her lungs.  
  
“Chan? Where are you?”  
  
“In the isolated tower.” The line goes silent, and she whispers his name.  
  


-

 

**two.**

  
“Do you ever listen when you speak?” Chan asks, head cradled on his chest and a cigarette burning somewhere. She remembers lighting it, _she thinks_.  
  
Paul exhales in shapes, a trick he’s tried to teach her in back hallways around bottlenecks. They’ve done this before, sweat and salt and slick skin sliding. And they’ve tried the after of ashes and words, non-sequitirs and anecdotes and something passed back and forth. Well, it’s her doing the giving while he smokes one, two, three Camel Lights.  
  
She stretches, languorous, and when her breast pushes into his ribcage, he smirks. “I’m not Carlos.”  
  


-

 

**three.**

  
It starts like this: A tape recorder and a quip about a truck stop hat. Something to fixate on that pisses Daniel off. “There’s a pervasive sense of isolation and destruction.”  
  
“There’s beauty in watching something crumble.” Because it stings still, accusations ringing loud in his memory.  
  
“And what crumbled in your world?” Paul looks at the guy taking notes on scraps of paper, and he remembers writing words on skin, nonsense about ‘living proof’ and ‘picnics’ and ‘falling too fast’.  
  
“Nothing.” _Everything._ His fingers itch, yellowing nails digging into his palms hard, half-moon indentations on a full moon night.  
  


-

 

**four.**

  
His fingers press, and she wonders if her skin will be nicotine stained. She can feel him everywhere, in her pores, on her tongue, between her legs. _This is the story of a girl._  
  
A blunt nail scratches an inside wall, and her toes curl reflexively. He’s muttering something, an incantation, into her thigh and licking her apart at the seams.  
  
Chan watches shadows play on the building across the alley. Monsters move with the light, and she screws her eyes shut. She wants sensations in touch and not nightmares. Cigarettes, maybe wedding bands.  
  
“We should do a show together.”  
  


-

 

**five.**

  
Paul is backstage with a book and a bottle and a cloud. “The words won’t stop coming.”  
  
She nods at him, once, and reaches into his pocket. There’s two left in the pack and a book of matches from Dayton, Ohio. She smiles around the filter. This is about her, _them_ , in some manner, and Chan knows he’ll tell her when he’s ready.  
  
“The pressure’s too much.” And there are hints of accusations and expectations and she _knows_ what’s riding on this. She knows the fear. “I don’t know where my story begins.”  
  
“Begin at the beginning.” Simple as that.  
  


-

 

**six.**

  
This is how it starts: Miami in January and sandals in sand. Chan taps out another cigarette, ashtray overflowing already. Bottles tip easily and she spins the newest idly. Scotch to water and refracting light. Makes sense when it’s sharp.  
  
Her pocket vibrates. There’s ripples like sound massaging her, and she can’t remember the last time she _spoke_. “I hate myself and I want to die,” gritty like sandpaper and history. Like she used to be with Johnny and Bobby.  
  
“Miss you. Don’t know where I am.” She wants to go back, _if only_. But there might be nothing there.  
  


-

 

**seven.**

  
Paul talks like glass over gravel, serious and cutting. She never knows what he means and suspects he doesn’t either. Cohesion is there and gone like the lightning bugs she chased in North Carolina.  
  
“Do you really think you’re our generation’s Henry Miller?”  
  
Puff of smoke. “Do you really think you’re our generation’s Loretta Lynn?”  
  
Chan folds the napkin over once, twice. Coal miner’s daughter she could do. More glamorous than tobacco farmer’s, more real than crawling out of a bottle.  
  
Paul leans against her, and she knows it’s unresolved. They’ll dance about this point until it scars their flesh.  
  


-

 

**eight.**

  
There’s more to him than she recalls. Angles gone rounded and curves along planes. Something about cake and she looks to map her favorite constellation. Chan has never seen stars, but she knows patterns of moles on expanses of skin. It’s enough for her.  
  
She traces the map of dots with tongue, teeth, lips, and back to tongue. He tastes smoky, of late nights and regrets. Of possible futures and forgotten pasts. Of _need_ , _want_ , _now_.  
  
His breath hitches, and she smiles. There’s not enough time for her to learn this new version of him, but she tries to remember.  
  


-

 

**nine.**

  
It starts like this: She’s caged, walls closing in, weight upon her chest. No escape and she signed up for this. Signed her life away that day. Could be a song, somewhere, sometime.  
  
There’s a chair, a microphone, and her guitar. Something raw rattles inside her, and she wants to run. To Seattle, to Pittsburgh, to Macon. Except she’s been in all those places and nothing changes but the price of cigarettes.  
  
A shuddering breath and her skin itches. She wants Paul to be out there, the cocky bastard. Chan wants, needs, it more than she’s even willing to admit.  
  


-

 

**ten.**

  
He’s a part of this city as much as she’ll never be. He is smoking on sidewalks and fallen towers and midnight subway rides to Shea Stadium. All of him is confident and _at home_ in a way she doesn’t understand. Like it’s encoded in his DNA.  
  
Chan wonders how someone so young can be so comfortable in their own skin when she’s _still_ trying to figure it out. Except she knows some of it, maybe more, is a show for all who care to watch. There’s something dangerous about Paul, like their city – grimy corners, thick with black.  
  


-

 

**eleven.**

  
“They say your name like it means everything.”  
  
She smiles, small and private, and ducks her head. Paul is rarely reverential about anyone other than Kurt. “It’s not my name. It’s the name I gave them to use.”  
  
Paul inhales, contemplating. “But it’s still _you_ to _them_.”  
  
“It’s a _piece_ , Paul, Paul, Interpol. If I gave them everything, gave them Chan, what would I have left for me?”  
  
“Give them a song about you, for them. Something honest.”  
  
“I don’t have a fancy degree that gives me metaphors. I can only give them variations on a theme.”  
  
“And that is…?”  
  


-

 

**twelve.**

  
This is how it begins: Two packs of cigarettes (she hates his brand) and bottles littered everywhere. The night blurs into day blurs into night, and it’s making her sick. He’s alive with electricity. She can see it crackling along his skin, white-hot.  
  
She’s following it with her fingertips when he smiles, lopsided, and pulls her out of the crowd, into the alley. It’s a cliché. And it’s just like him.  
  
Bricks dig into her shoulder blades, and she fumbles his belt open. There are logistics, but they don’t mean anything when she palms his cock, feels him twitch. _Undone_.  
  


-

 

**thirteen.**

  
Paul’s gone at 4am when all she can do is watch words spill across pages at a slant. So much to say and only the fern to hear it.  
  
She scratches off another match and lets it burn, burn, burn before lighting the cigarette. It’s a small comfort.  
  
Chan doesn’t know, doesn’t _want_ to know, where he goes, drifting around the city like a well-dressed ghost. And maybe he is, with his evasive non-answers.  
  
Chan knows there’s someone else, someone _serious_ , someone she’ll never be. Oh, she’ll try but mightily. She wants to know when they’re done this time. Something new.  
  


-

 

**fourteen.**

  
They’re a study in contrasts when people start to think of them as ‘them’ and not ‘Paul and Chan’. But it’s all superficial and about a feeling conveyed. Confident poise versus nervous fumbling. Veiled mystery against a naked openness.  
  
They’re more alike than different, though. Chasing demons with rows of bottles and clouds of smoke. Obtuse words that mean nothing and everything and something. Like them, something undefined and inarticulate. Words never meant as much as they do since she’s started fucking Paul. And that’s what it is, no good sugar-coating. It’s sex, not love, because they’re not in love.  
  


-

 

**fifteen.**

  
It starts like this: He’s back in the city two weeks before he calls her. She considers saying, “No,” turning her back on him and saying, “Yes,” to Paris. But she’s never been strong when it comes to Paul. Chan lives in history, yearns for the way things were. When she knew answers without knowing questions.  
  
She lets him up without a word, toying with a lighter, feeling the words. The door is open, and she waits. He slides in quietly, like he belongs. “I was in Costa Rica, I think.” It’s as close to an apology as she’ll get.  
  


-

 

**sixteen.**

  
His shirt is buttoned around her three times, sleeves rolled to her elbows. Tails hang between her legs, and her sex-mussed hair tumbles around the collar. She sits on the counter, legs crossed, and watches him fiddle with her coffee machine in trousers and nothing else, cigarette clamped between his lips.  
  
She laughs at the bizarre domesticity, and he turns with a smirk. He stalks across the narrow space, wraps her legs around him. “You look like sin.” She pulls the cigarette out of his mouth, looks at him from under lashes.  
  
“Fuck.” She pulls him in closer and _breathes_.  
  


-

 

**seventeen.**

  
“Dear Sir.” _Dear Paul._  
“There’s nothing here for you anymore.” _I can’t trust myself around you._ “The cigarettes burn so long and the words still don’t flow.” _I don’t know what this is anymore, even if you do._ “I’m going to Memphis.” _This isn’t me anymore._ “Don’t follow me.” _We should stop._  
  
It’s not signed, but he knows she’s on a Greyhound. And all he’s left with is a Manhattan that’s suddenly not big enough. Too much and not enough. When he returns, his apartment is twice the size it had been. “Nobody told you to make up your mind.”  
  


-

 

**eighteen.**

  
This is how it begins: She’s vomiting in the bathroom, words, _hate_ , bile spewing forth. It burns, acidic, and brings tears to her eyes. She holds her own hair back.  
  
Someone, Susanna maybe, asks if she’s alright. She takes a moment, two, to pull herself together as much as she can. She wants a cigarette. “Is it because of him?”  
  
And there it is, swimming dark in the churning waters. It could be about both of _them_ if she’s honest. The East Coast is littered with her ghosts, and she can’t outrun them anymore. Not like this. Not right now.  
  


-

 

**nineteen.**

  
When she gets back, Manhattan has spit him out. Sam finds her. She remembers Sam, vaguely, purple suit and charisma and an eye for framing.  
  
“He fell apart, y’know?” And it’s oddly cleansing to realize she’s not the only one to come undone. “Said he had to get out while he still could.”  
  
Chan is outside a bar in Jersey City, resisting temptation, chain-smoking, waiting. Paul doesn’t disappoint.  
  
He’s skinnier than she remembers. He doesn’t look up, just turns left, walks away. It’s a moment before her brain communicates that she needs to _move_.  
  
“Welcome back, Chan.”  
  
“I’m home, Paul.”  
  


-

 

**twenty.**

  
He thrusts, and her back arches off the mattress, a groan forced out. He smirks, arrogant _fuck_. She curls her leg tighter around his waist and pulls him down with a satisfying, “Ooomph.” His rhythm stutter-steps, and now she’s the one smirking. The angle changes, friction building, and she keeps him in place with her leg.  
  
Hands move to neck, jaw, hair, fingers scrabbling. She pulls him into a kiss, tongue mapping, teeth nipping, lips drawing forth and swallowing a smoky moan. He grabs her wrists, restrains them over her head one-handed.   
  
He leverages himself off her. “Say my name.”  
  


-

 

**twenty-one.**

  
It starts like this: Paul is late. Always. The watch he wears is nothing more than decoration. And even if it worked, he wouldn’t follow it.  
  
He’s drinking coffee and listening to his iPod on the subway. He wants a cigarette, _badly_. He starts drumming a beat, nervous energy uncoiling.  
  
They’re on the final leg of the tour, and he needs to escape, to distance himself from the other three. Especially Carlos. His surliness is threatening their functioning unit, and it scares him. So much is riding on this.  
  
She sits by a fountain, petting a poodle. Serene. Beautiful. Breakable.  
  


-

 

**twenty-two.**

  
“Do you still want to do a show?” Paul peels the label back, not meeting her eyes.  
  
“I don’t have new material.” He always makes her feel inadequate now.  
  
“Never stopped you before.”  
  
“Paul… Why me? You don’t owe it to Matador anymore.”  
  
“This isn’t about labels, Chan. It’s about New York. And you, Cat Power, are New York.”  
  
She’s quiet for a moment, understanding what he isn’t saying, can’t say. “I’ll think about it.”  
  
His head snaps up at that, a shy smile around his cigarette. Always with the damn cigarettes. “Yeah?”  
  
She can’t stop her answering grin. “Yeah.”  
  


-

 

**twenty-three.**

  
Humidity, thick in summer, presses down on them. The city is sweltering, and everyone is on edge, waiting for the tipping point. There’s no relief in sight.  
  
Paul is moodier than usual. She had asked about it earlier and got a mumbled, “’s’nothing,” in response. He pulls his hat lower over his eyes and filches out his fourth cigarette of the night. They’ve been here half an hour.  
  
Chan hums, trying out a new arrangement, not in the fucking _mood_ for dealing with the bruised ego of one Paul Banks. “I told a reporter about you, Chan Marshall.”  
  
Oh. _Oh_.  
  


-

 

**twenty-four.**

  
This is how it begins: She’s dizzy with Scotch, and he’s smoking on the couch. She twirls and spins until her hair tangles and limbs feel weightless. She catches him staring and can’t stop the quirk of her lips.  
  
There’s a room nearby, and he follows her without words. Pressing him against a wall, unbuckling his belt, hands everywhere. He wants to kiss her, and she laughs her denial. Chan drops to her knees, and he pushes her hair out of her eyes.  
  
She’s sloppy when she’s drunk. There are too many teeth, not enough suction, but he comes anyway.  
  


-

 

**twenty-five.**

  
Chan’s tearing paper and shaping words, folding them back in on themselves. A diary, a notebook, old diner placemats. She’s fidgeting in a darkened room. She creases squares and tries to remember cranes.  
  
There are demands for her to focus, but all she can do is think about Atlanta. She has a ticket to the sun, and it’s burning a hole in her pocket. Another one gone, another one she can sing songs about, twelve minute epics, reinterpretations of the greats. Mick knows. And Bobby, too.  
  
Paul watches her through half-lidded eyes and a thickening cloud. His pupils dilate, raw.  
  


-

 

**twenty-six.**

  
This is how it ends: Madison Square Garden in September and her voice can’t fill the arena. It’s intimate and impersonal, and she’s trying to keep from quavering. Easy segue to “New York, New York” because, fuck Paul anyway, it _is_ about New York tonight.  
  
She watches from the side of the stage as they start the set, and she knows the songs are still about her, about _them_. Her smile is bittersweet.  
  
It’s too much, though, to hear the crowd telling her story, _their_ story. She retreats backstage and watches celebrities smoking, waiting.  
  
“Cat Power?” She turns. “I’m Helena.”

**Author's Note:**

> **Even more notes:**
> 
> This is where we start. In the August 2007 Spin cover story on Interpol, the following appeared, “…he [Paul] confesses to a crush on Chan Marhsall (a.k.a. Cat Power)…” And thus this fic started to take form.
> 
> Interpol played Madison Square Garden on September 14, 2007. The Liars and Cat Power were the opening acts. This was the only stop on the tour where Cat Power appeared. In the hiatus between the end of the Antics tour and the start of writing Our Love To Admire, Interpol took three months off. When asked what he did on his break, Paul Banks usually replies that he doesn’t know. He ended up in either Costa Rica or the Dominican Republic on a beach. When he got back, he moved from the city to Jersey City. He chain-smokes like it’s going out of style, puts on weight when he’s on tour, has a lot of moles, reveres Kurt Cobain to an unhealthy level, wants to be Henry Miller so very badly, and is notorious for being ‘difficult’. He also refuses to discuss the meaning of his lyrics beyond saying they mean what people want them to mean.
> 
> Cat Power dropped out of high school and moved to NYC to start a music career. Her bouts of stage fright and perfectionism in her performance are the stuff of legend. In 2005, she suffered a breakdown while in Miami. She was checked into Mt. Sinai by her friend and spent four days there before leaving of her own accord. Since then, she declares herself sober and says that the breakdown was caused by her realization that an ex of hers had really moved on. She was the face of Chanel jewelry in a 2006 campaign, does the best covers of old standards by stripping them of everything familiar and making them her own, still smokes, and has a love affair with Bob Dylan. “But half the time, I’m still trying to save myself first.” [Spin, December 2006]
> 
> Despite it all, there’s no evidence that Paul Banks and Chan Marshall ever dated. The rumor is, though, that Paul met current girlfriend Helena Christensen backstage at the MSG show.


End file.
